


Buttons and Stitches

by Whreflections



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Hale Fire (Teen Wolf), Alternate Universe - Magic, Good Peter Hale, Kid Derek Hale, Kid Fic, M/M, Mage Stiles Stilinski, Toymaker Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:28:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25524400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: At Impossible Creations, Stiles crafts toys infused with magic- and at least once a week, he takes some of his downtime to pass a few of those toys out to sick children at the hospital where his mother died.  If he can soothe an old wound and help a few kids and parents with theirs, it's the least he can do- he just never expected he might run into a soulmate at the same time.  In his past experience, good things don't happen in hospitals- except, sometimes they do.
Relationships: Chris Argent/Peter Hale, Chris Argent/Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Melissa McCall/Sheriff Stilinski, Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 33
Kudos: 279
Collections: Not to be misplaced, Steter Week 2020





	Buttons and Stitches

**Author's Note:**

> How long is this story? How many chapters will there be?
> 
> /Fuck knows/ lmao
> 
> Originally, this was planned as a oneshot. It was going to be like...probably 10-15k, and be done before steter week, and all posted at once- but a couple things happened. 
> 
> 1\. My workload at work /exploded/ due to corona/quarantine.
> 
> 2\. As of recently, I have a new relationship- which is exciting and amazing and wonderful and I'm thrilled about, so sitting to write on this fic my brain would just turn into a white noise of joy and I'd end up closing the window and doing something else lmao
> 
> So. This isn't complete- but I want to participate in steter week, and share some of this with you- it'll be complete eventually.  
> It'll also be stetopher eventually, which is in the tags but I wanted to mention it here, too. This fic focuses mostly on Stiles and Peter, though. 
> 
> Happy steter week, everyone ^^

There were no rules to the comfort animals for the hospital, other than that their eyes were always made of his grandmother’s buttons. Stiles had no intention of stopping when he ran out, of course, but what he’d do at that point he wasn’t yet certain—it wasn’t officially part of the spell, per se, but there was something about reaching into the tin his mother had showed him when he was too small to enchant anything that he was sure could never be replicated by any other process.

Once upon a time, it had held a Christmas cake. It was white, gold garland painted on the sides, draping scenes of snowy houses with warm yellow light in the windows and no shortage of color and holly. The chipping of the paint in places only made it look more like something that belonged in a home, something loved and held by dedicated hands. The casual user could not have amassed a button collection large enough to fill it, but Kinga Mazur hadn’t been casual. 

Collecting buttons during the war had given her something to do with her hands; keeping it up had done the same. It didn’t matter that she’d never learned to sew—she had them, if someone needed them. They were found on the street, snipped off her own clothes when they grew too worn to wear, purchased here and there at thrift shops if she had a little change and the button was particularly worthy. 

Claudia had practiced the habit in the way of throwing loose change into a jar—familiar motions, barely noticed, the setup for a future of sorting that may or may not ever come. Her joy at Stiles’ amusement when he first sank his fingers into them was probably more of a return than she’d ever expected. If she had lived long enough to see the use he put them to, that might have changed. He’d like to think she would have been even happier, then.

Stiles rarely sat down with the knowledge of what animal he was about to make. He chose the eyes, first, and they would whisper the truth of it to him, like the rustle of leaves under the press of rain. All the world spoke to a mage; they had opened their ears to it through study, and practice, and the deliberate jostling loose of just the right amount of common sanity. 

For the dolphin, the eyes were nothing close to matched—one button large and plastic and square, vivid turquoise; the other small and round and metal, near black with age. The body was navy blue corduroy, but for the soft, fluffy cream of the belly. There was never a child in mind; never a plan—it all came from the eyes; the right child would take them when they came along. Sometimes, they vanished off the cart the very day he finished them; some were with him for months. 

The dolphin was chosen by a girl with a swollen eye and a broken leg, the slight seep of blood from the cuts on her fingers hidden by the dark fabric as she squeezed him close. 

“My favorite book is about the dolphin riders,” she said. 

Stiles didn’t know it, and didn’t let on. 

“Yeah? I’m sure he’ll love to hear all about it—maybe your mom can read it to both of you. Go on and teach him his name so he’ll learn to respond to it. Just squeeze his flipper and whisper it next to his head.”

Stiles never tired of seeing the spell activate—not even though he’d created it, not even though he’d done it dozens of times. 

With her mouth pressed against him on the side with the littlest eye, she named him. 

“Izzy—but it’s short for Isaiah.” 

The gleam of light in Izzy’s button eyes just before his little body started to warm made her giggle.

“Mom, look; he’s real! He’s real now!”

Stiles leaned over his cart, elbows squashing an orangutan. “Ah, he’s _magic_ now—if you want him to be _real_ , you gotta do it the old fashioned way and love him until you give him life, like the velveteen rabbit. Do you know the story of the velveteen rabbit?”

Maybe she did, or maybe she didn’t. She was too busy talking to Izzy to tell him. 

~~~~~~

Most of the parents and guardians were only grateful. Every now and then, he’d have to face a cynical soul with the snidely asked question of _Why aren’t you selling these things? You could make a bank._

If he had his way, he’d have preferred not to answer at all. From his view, the answers were obvious—in a fairly small town, he’d sell a few, but not enough to make him rich. Besides, he _did_ sell a few, and he had a whole store full of other toys crafted and enchanted with care. 

Could he have taken the concept online and made more? Sure, maybe, but it didn’t matter. He hadn’t become a toymaker to get rich. 

When he’d waited in this hospital for his mother to die, he’d have given a hell of a lot for company that fit into his lap, that coursed with magic and felt as real as life. His dad never could have afforded it. 

If he could take that worry from someone’s dad, and give a frightened child a friend, then he was already getting paid, in full, with interest gathered. In the hours when he still woke up and missed his mother like even adults do, it gave him memories to rub along the burn. 

~~~~~~

There was peace in the hospital at night. When Stiles had tried to explain that to his dad once, it was clear he hadn’t gotten it, but Melissa did—she spent enough time in those dark and strange hours to feel it for herself, the peculiar near liminal magic of a place half empty, lit by the glow of vending machines and full of the intersecting energies of hope and despair. They jangled against each other in the air like competing notes—for anyone who could sense magic, the soundless melody of it was haunting. 

It was half of why he liked to deliver the toys at night, when he could. The other half was comfort—a stuffed animal was always particularly welcome at night. Stiles still had one next to his own pillow, after all, and he refused to let himself feel any shame about that. 

Besides, if he’d tried to banish Leo, he’d have felt like an ass. He was no velveteen rabbit, per se, but Stiles was sure he’d long ago exceeded his programming. The thrum in the air around him didn’t feel like a standard spell, too honey thick and old. 

If even one of his toys made enough of an impact to be that for someone else, he’d have done his job well. 

The last door in the pediatric ward was almost closed—he almost didn’t go in. It was past midnight, but it was cracked, and he could hear the sound of a voice rising and falling. Storytime, no doubt. Stories were always better with a friend. 

With a soft knock, he pushed the door open, wheeling the cart in to a spacious room that he had before seen hold four patients. It held only two, now, a girl in a bed near the window, and a boy in a bed closer to the door. The girl was older, her bed shrouded in a hazy lilac shimmer that indicated a magically induced coma. What her specific color meant, Stiles didn’t know enough medicine to say, but sympathy jerked his heart into his throat all the same. 

The boy was awake, his dark eyes looking up from a nest of blankets, past the man sitting in a chair by his bed. The book open on the man’s knee was red leather, the pages limned in gold. Under better circumstances, Stiles would have sworn the man himself to be a model—or a stripper. He had a face that shouldn’t have existed in real life; it tripped Stiles up just long enough that he realized the words he should have started when he came in the door hadn’t yet come.

“Oh, hey, sorry to interrupt your story; I’m Stiles. This is the menagerie trolley—I saw you were still up, and I thought you might like to take a look and see if anyone here looks like they should be a friend of yours.” 

The boy didn’t even blink. He couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7, but there was a seriousness in his eyes so deep it was almost unsettling. Maybe he’d had it before and maybe he hadn’t, but whatever had brought him here it had been no cheerful spill off the monkey bars. 

The man shifted in his chair to better face Stiles, his arm laying full across the pages to keep their place. “You’re Melissa’s stepson, aren’t you?”

“That I am—I don’t really have a schedule so I know she never wants to confirm something if I can’t be here, but I know she puts out a good word when she can—did she talk to you about the stuffed animals already?”

“She did—it’s a nice project, but we aren’t sure we’re interested,” he said. There, he looked at the boy. The fondness in _we_ had gathered up like a drawn net around Stiles ribs, pulling tight. “Right?”

Cocooned within his blankets, the boy nodded once, then mumbled over the edge of them. “You don’t have my favorite animal.”

“Is that so?” Stiles said. Of all objections he’d expected, that hadn’t been on his radar. He’d gotten it before, of course, but more often than not, once they saw the trolley, they saw exactly what they wanted—whether it was their favorite animal or not. “How do you know I don’t have what you want when you haven’t even looked yet?”

“Ah,but she didn’t say you’d have _something_ he wanted—she said you had everyone’s favorite animal. Derek is dubious.” His name was chased by fingers through his hair, the touch lingering and shifting to help the boy sit up a little further in bed. “Careful, pup.” 

The flash of black lightning disappearing up past where the man’s sleeve was pushed up was unmistakable, and Stiles found himself turning his head. This was the part he hated, the part where he felt like an intruder on moments never meant to hold his shadow. Werewolf cubs were hardy. The fact that the kid was here at all meant something was bad wrong, something too strong or far-reaching for his burgeoning healing process to handle. 

The fact that he was here meant his life expectancy might be measured not in decades, but days. 

Stiles blinked at the cart, to clear his mind. He was down to his last five—a pangolin, a panther, a softshell turtle, a dalmatian with red spots, and the orangutan. That one he’d had for a while, waiting for just the right little hands—Derek’s weren’t the ones, he was sure. He tended to have a feeling about that sort of thing. 

“Alright, you’ve got me—” Stiles leaned across the top of the cart, far more dramatically than his usual slouch. He was almost positive it just nearly got him a smile. “What is your favorite animal?”

Rather than answer, Derek looked to the man by his bed. Whether seeking his help was shyness or tiredness was impossible for Stiles to say; either way, it was endearing.

“A wooly rhino,” the man said. His mouth quirked, but the humor of it didn’t come close to his eyes. They seemed from the side to be hollow, too quickly glimpsed for Stiles to get a feel for him beyond his pain. “His father was a paleontologist. Most of Derek’s favorite animals are dead.”

Stiles couldn’t help but laugh, and hope after that it had lightened the moment. “I gotta say, that’s not an obstacle I’ve run into before—but you know what, I respect it. That’s really good of you, to give them so much attention—extinct animals need love, too. I mean, it’s bad enough they’re gone; being forgotten—”

For half a second, the man looked ready to stop him, and Stiles had the sudden and visceral wince that came from realizing he’d jammed his foot through the roof of his mouth—but the boy wasn’t crying. 

Other than tugging his blanket slightly higher, he’d barely moved at all. “That’s what dad said about the Carolina parakeet. They stopped singing, but we couldn’t forget what they sounded like, or that they were there. He said it was like killing them again—” A wheeze cut through Derek’s words, lopping off whatever portion of his father’s advice had remained. It was deep and desperate, pained in a way that took Stiles back to watching a documentary with Melissa—children with diphtheria, gasping for air against pressure in their throat that would never be relieved. 

It chilled him down to his bones. 

“Breathe, sweetheart,” the man murmured. His hand rubbed slow and comforting along Derek’s spine, slipping just under his gown to find skin. “Slow down. Count to five.”

Stiles didn’t need the hitch in his breathing or the sudden improvement in Derek’s to know that he was drawing pain from him again—help fueled by devotion, better than a morphine drip. It made Stiles eyes burn. 

Determined, he skimmed his hand over the cart, judging by feel and instinct. It would be a hold over only, but this boy certainly needed a friend. 

“I tell you what,” Stiles said. “I’ll make you that wooly rhino, I promise, but until then, why don’t you take care of this one for me?” When what he touched felt right in his hand, Stiles yanked—and found himself holding out the softshell turtle, with her soft, grey shell, her belly made of quilt scraps. Her long, near elephant trunk-style neck flopped, her mismatched red and bronze eyes twisting in and out of view. 

Not his favorite animal, but it wasn’t Stiles’ imagination that Derek’s eyes flared. 

“I think she needs a friend, don’t you?”

Derek nodded once with all the solemnity of an irreversible decision, then snaked his arm out to reach for her dangling neck. His claws were just barely pricked, still, from either the stress of his coughing or the excitement of having a new friend. It didn’t really matter—Stiles’ creations were built to last. She could withstand claws, acid—even dragon fire, if she needed to. 

“She’s pretty,” Derek said. Flipping her over, his fingers traced the squares on her belly, swirling around flowers and vines and mindless curls. “What’s her name?”

“That part’s up to you—hold her close, and whisper her name in her ear. Then she’ll wake up.”

“Uncle Peter?” The rest of the question went unasked, but there all the same when Derek looked at him. 

_Uncle_ Peter. The brother of the paleontologist, maybe—Stiles couldn’t help but wonder. 

Peter took the turtle’s head in his hand, tilting it back and forth in his palm under the light until Derek giggled. “I just don’t know—she looks hideous—no offense to your work.” That time, when he looked up, his gaze was steady, and their eyes met. 

Having grown up with his magic forever part of the area around him, entwined with his blood, little surprised him—his life had, from a certain point of view, been a series of odd occurrences and the brush strokes of a power he often felt was more symbiotic than entirely controlled. 

His magic had a mind of its own; it always had, and in the meeting of their eyes, Stiles’ could feel it shiver like a current across his skin. The ripple of it was nearly as strong as the curtains of force that could be felt walking into a place of power, feeling the press and shift of natural or historic power layered against his skin. This, too, felt like inherent magic, effortless and strong. 

He had always been a romantic by his own admission—and still, it surprised even himself that the first thought to rise in his mind like a shaken sieve was Bronte. 

_Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same._

Before he could let himself consider there being any truth in it, Stiles looked away, a huff of laughter nudging his smile into place. “Yeah, none taken. Softshells are strange, but that’s what makes them so interesting—we can’t all look like leopards.” 

“I think she’s pretty,” Derek said.

“Of course you do,” Peter said. His fondness wasn’t free of exasperation. “What about Medusa? Persephone? Or Pancake, she certainly looks—”

“Talia,” Derek whispered once, then again with his mouth pressed close near the opening of her shell. His eyes squeezed shut too slow for them not to look wet. “Her name’s Talia.”

Talia’s button eyes gleamed, her serpentine neck rising so she could nuzzle at Derek’s hair. It only made him squeeze her tighter. 

Peter was already wrapping his arms around both of them before Derek’s shoulders had started to shake. 

On his way to slip out the door, Stiles caught the murmur of his voice, low and muffled against Derek’s hair. 

“It’s okay, pup. I should have thought. That’s a good name—that’s perfect. That’s perfect.” 

By the thickness in his voice, Stiles had gotten it wrong. Not the brother of the paleologist, but of his wife. 

~~~~~~

With sushi between them on the back picnic table, Stiles asked his stepmom about the patients at the end of the ward. 

“—you know, the kids with that guy who’s obviously bought out the big room. Peter something.”

“Peter Hale,” Melissa said. Rather than use her chopsticks, she picked up her tiger roll with her fingers. “It’s a terrible story; I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.”

“If it’s not terrible enough for dad to be investigating, I probably haven’t.”

“Terrible as in it made the national news—didn’t you hear anything about that house fire in Oregon?”

Not in more than passing, but he had—it had popped up on the news feed on his phone, and the headline had made his stomach turn. 

_Fifteen dead in pack home fire in Eugene, OR_

It was too fucking sad; he hadn’t even clicked on it. With the world as it was, he tried to limit how much he let himself drown in distant-yet-still-visceral sadness. If he didn’t, he’d go under. 

“Shit.”

“Those two kids were the only survivors. They called Peter to come home since he was next of kin; he had to hear about the fire and becoming their guardian all at once—and then to find out they both survived but might not make it? It’s horrifying.” 

Ever since he was old enough to understand his dad’s job, Stiles had been waiting for a call to change his life like that. It had never come—he hoped it never would, and one person wasn’t the same was losing fifteen—but still, this was a flavor of pain that he had imagined. He’d turned it over in his mind so often in the dark that sometimes, it didn’t feel scary anymore. If you’d already run your hands over every inch of the hydra, you’d already know the feel of its teeth when it bit down. Half of the force of pain was in the surprise. 

“What’s wrong with them? I know with fires there’s smoke inhalation, but Derek’s a werewolf—”

“And the fire was magical, infused with wolfsbane. They said the sky above the house was purple for hours. His older sisters Rachel and Laura tried to get him and their little sister Cora out through an upstairs window and across the roof. Derek made it down, but the smoke inhalation seems it may have done irreparable damage to his lungs. Peter brought him here because Dr. Deaton’s an expert on severe injury and illness in developing werewolves, but if he can’t kick start Derek’s healing process enough to take over, he’s going to need a lung transplant. The donor can be human, but as fragile as he is—he’s not out of the woods.” 

As she leaned over the table, Melissa reached not for another roll, but to lay her hand across his arm. As a kid, he’d worried that if he ever had a stepmother, he’d feel like they were trying too hard to be someone they weren’t. With Melissa, it had never been like that—she’d been loving and comforting him almost as long as his mom had. It was different, sure, but it still coaxed air out of lungs, and stilled the nervous twitch in his leg. 

“Hey, I know. I don’t want to think about it, either; he’s a sweet kid.” 

In blinking, Stiles could see his dark eyes, solemn as he used his precious air to talk about the Carolina parakeet. 

“What about the others, his sisters?” Three had gone with him, only one had come out. When he surfaced from the trauma of being suffocated by his own body, Derek would have a hell of a lot to send him to therapy.

“Rachel followed Derek, since she was human. She was badly burned in the process of either getting up to the window or getting down off the roof—neither of them have been able to give a very clear statement, but after she made it, Laura sent Cora. They were on the ground; they don’t know exactly what happened, but part of the roof gave way and Cora fell through. Laura went after her, and,” Melissa’s hand rose, gesturing. She picked up her water, and didn’t drink it. “They found both of them in what was left of the hall. They’d tried to make it out the front door.”

“So best case scenario, these kids survive and need intensive therapy for the rest of their lives.”

“That’s what we’re hoping for. Rachel’s in a magical coma to keep her out of pain while her body tries to heal the burns—I think she has a solid chance of a full recovery.”

His entire family gone, and at least one kid now his, maybe two. 

Hopefully two.

Of all times to have met a man he was sure from the current of magic alone that he could marry, now wasn’t the time to come into Peter Hale’s life—or it was exactly the time, if he altered his expectations, and kept his mind open to the workings of the magic. No one who didn’t work with it would believe him, but so often working with magic was a fumble in the dark, outstretched hands to feel a line slipping through your fingers, tugging you here and there with the brush of knots through your fingertips. He could never see where he was going, and if he could, he could never see the path between. 

Impatient for certainty, Stiles pressed his thumb into the wood of the picnic table, and felt a splinter drive up into his skin. The jab of it was certain, and immediate. Some laws of the universe were still easy to understand.


End file.
